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O nce upon a time, every new superhero movie seemed to exist in (not-so) splendid isolation. Michael Keaton's Batman never 😄 met Christopher Reeve's Superman, despite the cities of Gotham and Metropolis being situated less than 300 miles apart in many 😄 DC comic book tales. When Sony's Spider-Man found himself under threat from the likes of the Green Goblin, Doc Ock 😄 and even a nefarious Symbiote in the early to mid-noughties Tobey Maguire films, he did not dial up Iron Man 😄 or send an email into space for the attention of one Thor Odinson of Asgard – because those characters were 😄 inconveniently owned by someone else. Only in the comics was Ant-Man likely to bump into the Hulk, or Mister Fantastic 😄 make the acquaintance of Captain America.

It was Marvel Studios, beginning with 2012's The Avengers, that popularised a brave new world 😄 of interconnected superheroes who, in many ways, broke all the rules of superhero film-making. Suddenly, heroes and villains were capable 😄 of extended, multiple episode character arcs that added a richness and realism to proceedings that had rarely been seen before. 😄 Iron Man might just have invented time travel, but on a psychoanalytic level he felt like a real person capable 😄 of genuine human emotions, soaring success, abject failure ... ahem, casual sexism ... and everything in between. Each new superhero 😄 to emerge fully formed into the Marvel multiverse felt intelligently connected to all the others, ripples in the fabric of 😄 reality in one corner of the multiversal web somehow affecting matters somewhere else entirely in unexpected ways (at least until 😄 the more recent, weaker films).

All of which might leave us wondering exactly why Marvel supremo Kevin Feige has just revealed 😄 that the new Fantastic Four film, in which Reed Richards, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing are 😄 about to debut for Marvel movies, will take place (at least initially) somewhere that does not seem to be in 😄 the MCU at all. Speaking on the latest episode of the Official Marvel Podcast, Feige confirmed suggestions that the film 😄 will be set in the 1960s, but hinted heavily that this will be a very different version of 20th-century. terrestrial 😄 reality to any we've yet seen.

"It is a period film," said 😄 Feige. "There was another piece of art we released with Johnny Storm flying in the air, making the 4 symbol 😄 and there was a cityscape in the corner of the image. And there were a lot of smart people who 😄 noticed that the cityscape doesn't look exactly like the New York that we know or the New York that existed 😄 in the '60s in our world. Those were smart observations."

This is nothing new for Marvel, in a sense. The advent 😄 of alternate realities in episodes such as Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, not 😄 to mention the TV series Loki, means we're used to seeing our heroes jumping from one universe to the next. 😄 Moreover, the absence of the Fantastic Four from the MCU would explain why nobody has ever mentioned them up until 😄 now. And yet if Feige really is hinting that the team will begin their journey in a different universe to 😄 the Earth 616 we've become used to, and which so closely resembles our own without the superheroes, this is still 😄 something new and different.

Rather than starting out in our own world, these are superheroes from another universe who are (presumably) 😄 likely at some stage to make the time and reality jump so that they interact with the characters we already 😄 know. That is after all, kind of the point of Marvel on the big screen, even to the extent that 😄 we now have superheroes who once existed in entirely different film series – Spider-Man and his various enemies in No 😄 Way Home; Deadpool and Wolverine in the forthcoming Shawn Levy film – happily fistbumping the MCU crew.

Of course, Marvel might 😄 just do something truly original here and keep the awesome foursome trapped in their own world, despite the fact that 😄 they have every means of bringing them into the big, multiversal picture. Who wouldn't want to explore a super-stylised, fantasy 😄 take on the 1960s where everything is slightly different from our own world, in appealingly far-out and intriguing ways? Maybe 😄 the Beatles are all Martians – who knows how weird this stuff could get? But wouldn't that, in a sense, 😄 be cheating, given how Marvel has spent all its time and effort since 2008's Iron Man convincing us that everything 😄 is connected, to the extent that every other studio making superhero movies has become too embarrassed to do anything but 😄 mimic its more successful rival?

The short odds are on the Fantastic Four making the leap pretty quickly. It might not 😄 happen in the space of a single movie but, when it does, the results could be seismic – or at 😄 least amusing. For if advance publicity really does offer a realistic look at the groovy retro world where the quartet 😄 begin their journey, this is going to be the nuttiest fish-out-of-water tale since Arnold Schwarzenegger went chariot racing and fought 😄 a bear in Central Park in 1970's Hercules in New York.